There seems to be a deluge of questions by folks with rep of 1-10. Many of these questions are "homework" or questions that are annoying to me "please read my 500 line script and tell me whats wrong with it" Is there any way to filter questions by reputation?

been a year and i still dont see any change, still lots of questions being asked by lazy people where a simple link to the manual page would suffice. why was this feature declined?
–
QuamisJun 25 '10 at 12:31

7 Answers
7

There are also a lot of new users with good questions who haven't had the chance to gain rep yet. We already have closing, downvoting, flagging, deleting and editing. Those are in place to clear up spam, unclear, offensive, closed and poorly-worded questions, respectively.

Votes, flags and closing is a much better indication of a question's worth than the reputation of the one who asked it. I can name a lot of high-rep users who consistently ask bad questions, and I've seen lots of good questions asked by brand new users. A filter won't solve anything.

Completely agree there. We were all there once..
–
Alex RozanskiJul 9 '09 at 17:30

5

Perhaps they should get their first 10 rep by actually answering a question first.
–
Byron WhitlockJul 9 '09 at 18:04

8

That's a foolish theory, Byron. The vast majority of users find SO because they're trying to find information, not because they're itching to teach people computer science.
–
XMLbogJul 9 '09 at 18:29

"I can name a lot of high-rep users who consistently ask bad questions, and I've seen lots of good questions asked by brand new users." - there are always exceptions. so what? are you saying there's no statistical quality difference between the questions of those user groups? it scares me the way you quickly jump to the conclusion "A filter won't solve anything."
–
Karoly HorvathMar 7 '14 at 11:11

If a significant number of the people who actually answer questions were to do this, it would seriously impact the number of new people coming to SO to ask questions. If people don't get their questions answered, they won't be back. Overall, I think it would degrade the utility of SO in unacceptable ways.

I don't think a significant number of "answerers" would do this. This type of esoteric behavior usually doesn't take the community over.
–
Jonathan SampsonJul 9 '09 at 21:10

Tvan, I completely agree. @Jonathan Why would we implement a feature that we don't want users to use? Every feature must be designed assuming that many people will adopt it. As soon as someone starts using it and mentioned how great it is, others will use it, and never realize what they're missing. It is a way of stating "StackOverflow is full. We don't need any more new users".
–
devinbJul 2 '10 at 15:44

They will come back since whenever they google something they will come across SO. Not getting any replies will tell them they are doing something wrong. And they will hopefully learn.
–
TanvimilAug 17 '13 at 9:55

StackOverflow is designed to be a place where anyone can meaningfully contribute to the site with zero buy-in. You can, should you choose to, create a question without even logging in.
We want this behaviour, because it allows the generation of all the rich content we have. We want to set the bar to entry to be quite low, because once a user arrives and finds it welcoming, we want them to stay.

Remember, Low rep does not equal low skill!

Low rep means that they have not been around StackOverflow very long.
The following is a selection of users who's questions would get filtered. (AFAIK)

This request was declined for a good reason, offering a bounty won't change it.

These sites are not about people. Judge the content, not the person who posted it. Filtering by reputation makes absolutely no sense, there are bad questions asked by users with 500 of reputation, and great questions asked by new users every day.

Such thing would only lead to make it harder for new people to get answers, even if their questions are great. It's already hard enough to get attention, with your question staying on front page for about 20 minutes max, don't increase the problem.

Elitism is the plague of all computer related help sites, and I'm pretty sure we don't want that on the trilogy.